Spiritual, secular intersect in “The Oldest Son”
A ring of the doorbell will change everything for a married couple — and the world? — in playwright Sarah Ruhl’s involving drama “The Oldest Boy: A Play in Three Ceremonies,” at Miners Alley Playhouse.
The central character, Mother ( Lisa Decaro), has just settled onto her meditation cushion — although the doorbell is hardly the first distraction to her practice. There was the cooing coming from a baby monitor; a bag of chips also beckoned.
The unexpected guests turn out to be the tangerine-robed lama Rinpoche ( Tessa Fuqua) and a younger monk ( Tim Inthavong). Mother thinks they’ve come to pay her husband, Father (Peter Trinh), a visit. He owns a well-regarded Tibetan restaurant in town. But they’ve ostensibly come to see Mother and Father’s 3-year- old son, Tenzin.
The lama Rinpoche believes the child is the reincarnation of her teacher. She hopes to confirm this and then persuade Mother and Father to allow the Oldest Boy to travel to a monastery in India.
Limning that rich and uncomfortable space between the secular and the spiritual, “The Oldest Boy” finds Mother and Father entertaining the wrenching question: What if their child is indeed the incarnation of Rinpoche’s teacher? What if the little dude wants to go home to India, where the Dalai Lama and the largest population of Tibetan Buddhists live in exile? And, as many good stories do, this one asks the audience: What would you do?
Ruhl has written a searching play about the touchpoints of different cultures and how people who love each other navigate them. The echoes and divergences in different religions arise. Although Mother was raised Catholic, she no longer considers her
self one. Yet, the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Mary and Joseph will arise. And though she meditates, she answers “sort of” when Rinpoche asks if she’s a Buddhist.
The playwright has clearly penned a drama about motherhood. If motherhood is about fighting tooth and nail for the truths of your child, then what does that look like if that child is a toddler who doesn’t know everything yet to come, but clearly has a special mix of the childish and preternaturally wise?
A puppet (created by Cory Gilstrap) portrays the toddler Tenzin/the Oldest Boy. Actor Rob Payo manipulates and voices the child but is intended to evoke the aged reincarnation. And this wavering of Payo’s role — is he puppeteer, child, teacher? — is one of the play’s boldest gestures. That the character is identified in the script as the Oldest Boy may be a hint to where the play will land on the matter of the child’s spiritual status.
Although Mother’s journey is foregrounded, Father doesn’t disappear from the quandaries. And Trinh conveys well the way Father inhabits his betwixt-and-between status as a Tibetan who lives in America because of China’s invasion of this native land.
While the title and character’s names nod at the ritualized as well as the archetypal, under the direction of producing artistic director Len Matheo, Decaro and Trinh ground their characters in two very believable people. In a nice touch, the two narrate the flashback to how they met.
She was soaked by a pouring rain and ducked into a restaurant with an OPEN sign. It was getting on time to close but something about her spoke to him. He had lost a homeland. She had recently lost a teacher. Their connection is swift and dear — and vexed. She has a fiancé. He is set to marry a Tibetan woman in an arranged marriage. Each betrothed becomes an afterthought, although Father frets about his own mother’s disapproval. But as he tells Rinpoche, “Karma decided.”
Act Two finds Mother on a cushion again, this time in Dharamsala, India. She’s mildly better with distractions. She is also 36 weeks pregnant. It is just a visit, she tells her mother on the phone. A curative, of sorts: Tenzin wanted to see the monastery and seeing it might make it less appealing. He is going to be enthroned but that’s merely a ceremony.
One of the vital relationships in Mother’s journey is with Rinpoche. Fuqua inhabits the spiritual teacher’s mix of curiosity and compassion well. ( If you are wondering if the casting of Fuqua is more non-traditional than factual, there remain very few women in that exalted role in the Tibetan Buddhism tradition.) And Mother and Rinpoche’s connection over the teacher who each has lost is a lovely touch. It is Rinpoche with whom Mother shares the story of her literature professor’s sudden death: He had been arguing with a colleague about the philosopher Mar tin Heidegger and the Holocaust. Although she doesn’t assert it, her account subtly makes a point about the genocidal acts of authoritarian regimes.
It is not often that I suggest a production could use more bells and whistles: this one could. Granted, resources can be limited, and the stage at Miners Alley is itself wee. Utilizing a wide screen and projections of images of Nepal and India is a deft way of connecting Father and the audience with that faraway homeland and makes up for the challenges onstage. But in her notes, the playwright suggests casting a small chorus, and that gesture would have added to the play’s engagement with Tibetan culture.
That said, Crystal MCKenzie’s costumes — from monks’ robes to the ceremonial garb at the enthronement — are rich with texture. Mother’s flowery, flowing dresses are especially expressive of her mildly hippie aura.
One of the wisest, richest refrains in “The Oldest Boy” is its variations on the word “refuge.” What a beautiful word, with its promise of haven, of sanctuary. In Tibetan Buddhism, practitioners underscore their commitment by taking refuge. Behind the word, though, also skulks the question: refuge from what? A refugee, Father sought sanctuary from China’s incursion into his homeland and found it in the U. S. That a play could leave a theatergoer ruminating on those shadings suggests that theaters, too, are a refuge.